A Cornwall Diary – Gunwalloe and Falmouth

Yesterday (Monday) I failed to visit Chun Quoit, approaching from the West across Woon Gumpus Common, due to a combination of flooding of the pathways, and my wearing insufficient footwear for the conditions. I can only hope that the scheduled guided walk this coming weekend has better luck.

Today (Tuesday), I had arranged to meet a friend of mine who had attended a guided walk earlier in the year, talking about the archaeology of Gunwalloe Church Cove on the west coast of the Lizard peninsula. He was kind enough to give me his own take on the earlier talk, which covered a history of continuous habitation in the area from the Neolithic through to the Medieval period. His knowledge of the area (having farming relatives nearby) was extensive, and I’m grateful to him for giving up his time today.

A three year excavation was completed this summer on ‘the Castle’ above the church,thought to have been a possible Iron Age cliff fort. Just north of the ‘Castle’ is a large bay, but in Medieval times this did not exist – the current ground level extended across the current bay and was thought to have held a village. Some evidence of middens can be seen in the current cliff faces. The whole area around Church Cove was important at the time of Domesday, but today there is just a single farmstead and a small house alongside the golf course.

On the other side of the Lizard, and to the North is Falmouth, home of the National Maritime Museum, which I’d visited earlier in the year, and where a project has been underway to reconstruct a Bronze Age log boat. It had been hoped that the boat would have been completed in September, but that was not to be, so I returned to check on progress.

It is still hoped that the boat will be completed this month, launched and rowed across the bay as a completion of the project, but given the current lack of planking for the hull, I’d be surprised if this were the case. Measurements of the hull were being taken today, and oars were being roughed out, so progress continues.